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Defend This
The boys in blue are taking a beating lately, much of it wholly unwarranted. However, on December 30th a New Jersey police officer did his part to lower the public’s trust of law enforcement. I’ll link the story because the language in the video is far outside Ricochet’s code of conduct.
The basic story goes like this: two cops pull over a car for failure to come to a complete stop at a stop sign. During the stop the officer on the passenger side of the car views a gun in the glove compartment of the vehicle. As one might expect things escalated quickly. While the driver of the vehicle complied readily by placing his hands outside the window of the vehicle the passenger did not. (The gun had been removed at this point.)
The officer is heard repeatedly ordering the soon to be deceased passenger not to move and to show his hands. At one point the officer warns “if you reach for something you’re going to be [expletive] dead.” The passenger seems to inform the officer that he is going to exit the vehicle (the audio is weak here) to which the officer says “no you’re not” several times while attempting to both train his weapon on the man and hold the door closed. The man opens the door and exits the vehicle anyway. Even though his hands were held at about shoulder level and he was clearly unarmed the officer fired seven times (by my count, and one after the man has fallen to the ground) and his partner fired once into the man’s back.
One cannot say the man resisted arrest such as in the Eric Garner case. The officers never informed the man he was being arrested. The man was accused of no crime at all. As he was the passenger the rolling stop at the stop sign cannot be charged against him. My understanding is that unless otherwise determined, the weapon was technically in the possession of the driver of the vehicle rather than the passenger. The only thing the man seems to have done wrong is not obey a police officer during an encounter in which the man was not a accused of any crime. For this he was shot repeatedly and killed.
Logic says that when a gun is pointed at you that it is at least nominally in your best interest to obey orders of the one pointing the gun. Liberty, however, says the state does not have the power to point a gun in your face without justification, and the state especially does not have the authority to kill you for standing up rather than sitting in a vehicle.
Published in General
No worries KP. I was more interested in the points raised than the way they were raised. Besides, I have my own issues on which I may be prone to hyperbole.
ctlaw, the term “shots fired” conveys very important information that sets into motion a lot of things. There will be a whole new sort of investigation, crime scene specialists with particular skills will be called, etc. etc. It doesn’t matter who fired the shots. That’s the proper call-out, and everybody in the business knows it.
Yes, responding officers will be extra cautious. They had better be. But also there will always be more information coming from the officer who made the call. Or, in the alternative, if s/he doesn’t come back with more information, then, well, you get the picture. No idiot will charge willy-nilly into what could be a deadly situation. Nor will a brother/sister in arms turn his/her back on a fellow officer.
I do have problems with what I see – I mean on the part of the officers’ actions. In my opinion, anybody who would reach through a car window to retrieve a firearm in the glovebox, with a suspect of any sort in the passenger seat, is, well, not smart, to be kind. The actions of the officer at the driver’s window is – I don’t know how to describe it, except as totally ineffective. But still, we don’t see the entire video. There’s way too much we don’t know for us to pass judgment.
With these sorts of things happening at far to regular intervals it becomes impossible to foster the relationship of trust and respect that should go both ways between citizens and those we entrust with the power of law enforcement. The civil part of society dies a little and we are all poorer culturally and socially for it. Our cops should be heroic and we should be able to look at them as such, but shootings like this take much from that ideal. Too many police officers, in my opinion, are taught to demand respect rather than develop the character which commands it.
KP, you’re leaping to the conclusion that this was unjustified (“shootings like this take much from that ideal”). Don’t rush to conclusions that aren’t evident, and that civil part of society won’t die as you say.
By “shootings like this” I’m referring to all the questionable shootings. The fault, of course, is not solely on law enforcement. We have a large swath of the citizenry who cannot be rightly called part of civil society. The left have destroyed all expectations of civility, then they wonder why we have thugs and criminals acting in ways in which cops must shoot them. It should uncommon when deadly force is used, but it should be less ambiguous. I believe the increased commonality of it exascerbates the decreased clarity of its justification.
That’s too glib and it shifts agency away from these people. There is always an underclass; there is always a segment uninterested in or incapable of participating in civil society. The left certainly exacerbates this naturally occurring phenomenon. Once upon a time, though, police had much more leeway to deal with these elements including “off the books” methods, and the general population knew better that phrases like “the other side of the tracks” had some truth and were not simply mean-spirited means to oppression.
This dynamic is frustrating. From my experience with people bringing outrageous cases to Ricochet, they are either inconclusive, incomplete, or not really outrageous at all. After much wrangling we can usually get to a point of agreeing that the facts are inconclusive. Yet, even still that case gets thrown onto the “questionable” pile which is then used to support the wider arguments about unfavorable trends of police abuse and such. That pile of support cases turns out to be pretty shaky and should not really be used as support for the broader argument.
I suppose then that defining the argument more succinctly is in order.
No, defining your argument more succinctly is not the answer. This post and your comments on it have been wrongheaded from the get-go. If I didn’t know better, I’d almost think that you have/had a hidden agenda.
Maximum liberty consistent with civil society is my agenda. Finding that balance between a state empowered to perform its legitimate functions yet restrained from venturing into tyrrany is my agenda. These cases where the state is its most active directly on individuals are where the rubber meets the road. Theories are one thing; half a dozen lead injections are something entirely different.
Is there an increased commonality, or are we just hearing about it more often?
Ed raises a good point: critiques of the police in the Internet age often center around ugly incidents (often with incomplete or unclear elements), which are presented both as clear-cut horror stories, and as broadly representative of American policing as a whole.
To my perspective, it’s reminiscent of the reporters who would comb Tea Party gatherings with thousands of people, and find the one nut with a placard of Obama as a monkey or something, who they would then treat as the truest expression of the movement’s heart.
I don’t think it’s representative, but how much is too much? Are there an acceptable number of bad shoots? I’m more concerned with the politics and policies behind such things.
I really want to agree that these incidents are cherry-picked for maximum effect. I can’t agree for the simple reason that none of these “bad apples” ever gets punished to any great degree. Paid leave during the investigation is entirely reasonable. Then, nothing more… ever — is the norm. In an especially egregious case, the officer may loose his badge, but they are NEVER held to the same standard as a citizen would be in identical circumstances.
Had Eric Garner had been in a similar physical altercation with with another non-official human, the fact of the death alone would be enough to require the filing of charges. No amount of water-muddying about which exact hold had been applied, how healthy or unhealthy Garner was, or whether he could in fact breathe or not, would make the slightest difference. The hammer would come down super hard because no matter what one might have meant or didn’t mean, there was a dead man on the ground.
Because only the police are empowered to legally use violence, they need to be kept on a very much shorter leash than an average person. They need to be held to a doubly or triply higher standard than I do; certainly, not a lower one. If you think the dangerous nature of the job should flip that equation then find another job. And good riddance!
You mean like in the case of the Texas father who beat his daughter’s rapist to death with his bare hands? Dead man on the ground and no charges.
Had he merely tried a chokehold, I am certain the outcome would be the same.
Rethink your premises.
I really miss Texas. Under my training that case would fall under “serious offenses against others” as the limited circumstance in which deadly force was authorized.
No charges either when a man shot the chief of police 4 times during a botched raid on his home in Oklahoma.
@KP – I quoted the Oklahoma case in the Self-Defense thread. Spot on. The same thing occurred in Mississippi, although the person was convicted of murder and placed on Death Row. In the space of 5 years, his conviction was overturned and remanded for a new trial wherein the Jury were to receive better instructions on the right to self defense. Cory Maye instead pled guilty to manslaughter and received time served.
I think it would have gone his way, but I can see why he chose the guilty plea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Maye
But you’re assuming that the officers in these examples are indeed bad apples. The facts needed to conclude that are either inconclusive, incomplete, or often indicate the opposite. Garner included. And, yes, those pesky facts do make a difference unless you’re of the opinion that the cops should be strung up any time an interaction ends in someone’s death.
I try to assume the best in motives for the officers in these types of things. They are trying to perform their assigned duties to the best of their abilities, within all regulations and standards, and in accordance with their training. That being the case, it is not the officers who bear the brunt of my ire. It is with the state as an entity where my anger lays. I don’t want to live in a state empowered to this level.
Why? Why assume anyone has the best in motives? It leaves you wide open to be a victim of those who don’t.
Mostly because one should never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. (or incompetence, or bad policy, or a host of other things) In this particular case the officer appeared more overwhelmed by the situation than anything else.
It’s irrelevant what the motive is.
What matters is that one suffers harm from letting one’s guard down, or making an unfounded assumption about another’s behavior.
I prefer to apply the presumption of innocence to a policeman involved in an altercation resulting in death, just as it should be applied to anyone else.
Only the jury is required to presume innocence. Everyone else in the system presumes guilt and behaves accordingly.
I was going to say something like “Ask Prawn about that.”
The cases sited are pretty cut-and-dry incidents of self defense/defense of family and thus not an accurate comparison with my point. I’m talking about 2 people arguing in public and then getting into fisticuffs. In that case a dead man on the floor will generate criminal charges 100% of the time.
Which could be a verbatim quote from any number of police training classes.
And I agree that they should take that approach!
But that’s raises and excellent point: there’s a big difference between not giving someone the benefit of the doubt, and presuming innocence.
Police ought to assume people are dangerous until proven not so. It’s simple self-protection. But that doesn’t give them the right to shoot people on that assumption! They’ve still got to wait for the courts to make the decision about guilt and punishment.
Too many of these conversations seem to assume that it’s fine for a policeman to shoot someone who appears threatening.
This is a point that often gets raised in these debates. The problem with this logic is that citizens are rarely, if ever, in identical circumstances. Everyday citizens are not called upon to respond to community complaints about unlicensed cigarette sales, or to make traffic stops at night in dodgy neighborhoods.
Criminal justice is, at its heart, the evaluation of individual acts in individual circumstances. Any hypothetical you try to construct to put a hypothetical citizen in those circumstances is basically doomed to fail, because at that point you will necessarily be talking about a different set of circumstances entirely. It’s true that the officers in Staten Island were arguing with Eric Garner. But that alone does not mean that “2 guys arguing on the street and one ends up dead” isn’t a wholly inadequate paradigm with which to evaluate that case.